Artists Double Up for WCCC Exhibition

Christine Romanell and Alexandra Schoenberg may have different styles, but what they have in common is the ability to spread their message through art.

Romanell and Schoenberg are both featured artists in May at Warren County Community College, where their works are on display at the Gallery on the second floor at the college. WCCC is located on Route 57 in Washington Township. The exhibit is open to the public during regular college hours and can be seen through May 22.

Romanell, whose art is showcased above (Quantum Bubbles), explains her work, “There is a beautiful, intricate dance that occurs in our brains in order to understand what we see. The eyes take in an image and almost instantaneously we decode and process patterns – looking for repetition. But what happens when we try to decipher something that appears to be more chaotic, such as an aperiodic pattern? Is chaos just another kind of order waiting to be discovered? If a pattern doesn’t repeat, but retains an unknown order, can chaos ever be truly understood?

“These questions,” she continues, “compelled me to research non-repeating patterns such as the two dimensional Penrose pattern, created in the 1970s. This then led me to the quasicrystal, its 3-dimensional sibling discovered in the 1980s. The quasicrystal is a crystalline structure that matches the Penrose tiling. Once considered impossible, this aperiodic crystal was first discovered in the lab and then later in a rare 4.6 billion year old meteorite. Current scientific research is focused on the unusual properties of this new form of matter concentrating on its thermal, electrical and light interactions.”

Her work therefore, introduces interference to quasicrystal patterns, generating a formless formalism. New hybrid forms are created from the intermixing of periodic with the aperiodic. Combining established terrestrial methods of interaction such as diffracted light, and rhombic tiling with macro quasicrystal acrylic constructions, the unexpected emerges. With each piece, aperiodicty in its very complexity in its very complexity imparts a profound new meaning to the underlying structure of our reality.

Schoenberg, meanwhile, uses drawing as a way of thinking and drawing is a way of seeing but not as a neutral tool.

She states, “My practice engages with two main ideas about architectural representational drawing: First, that different epochs developed different systems of representation and spatial relationships that cohere with the models of thought in place. Second, drawing is also influenced by neurology. By the way our brain interprets visual cues to construct depth, contour, color surface, etc. I like to juxtapose orthogonal drawing, perspective and axonometric projections to dispel the illusory nature of representing space, implicating the viewer in the content of the drawing and in the mechanics of observing at the same time.